Tamaki committed suicide on a windy late-autumn day three days before her twenty-sixth birthday. She hanged herself at home. Her husband found her the next evening when he returned from a business trip.

“We had no domestic problems, and I never heard of any dissatisfaction on her part. I can’t imagine what would have caused her to take her own life,” the husband told the police. His parents said much the same thing.

But they were lying. The husband’s constant sadistic violence had left Tamaki covered with scars both physical and mental. His actions toward her had verged on the monomaniacal, and his parents generally knew the truth. The police could also tell what had happened from the autopsy, but their suspicions never became public. They called the husband in and questioned him, but the case was clearly a suicide, and at the time of death the husband was hundreds of miles away in Hokkaido. He was never charged with a crime. Tamaki’s younger brother subsequently revealed all this to Aomame in confidence.

The violence had been there from the beginning, he said, and it only grew more insistent and more gruesome with the passage of time. But Tamaki had been unable to escape from her nightmare. She had not said a word about it to Aomame because she knew what the answer would be if she asked for advice: Get out of that house now. But that was the one thing she could not do.

At the very end, just before she killed herself, Tamaki wrote a long letter to Aomame. It started by saying that she had been wrong and Aomame had been right from the start. She closed the letter this way:

I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I don’t know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prison. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key. This marriage was of course a mistake, just as you said. But the deepest problem is not in my husband or in my married life. It is inside me. I deserve all the pain I am feeling. I can’t blame anyone else. You are my only friend, the only person in the world I can trust. But I am beyond saving now. Please remember me always if you can. If only we could have gone on playing softball together forever!

Aomame felt horribly sick as she read Tamaki’s letter. Her body would not stop trembling. She called Tamaki’s house several times, but no one took the call. All she got was the machine. She took the train to Setagaya and walked to Tamaki’s house in Okusawa. It was on a large plot of land behind a high wall. Aomame rang the intercom bell, but no one answered this, either. There was only the sound of a dog barking inside. All she could do was give up and go home. She had no way of knowing it, but Tamaki had already drawn her last breath. She was hanging alone from a rope she had tied to the stairway handrail. Inside the hushed house, the telephone’s bell and the front-door chime had been ringing in emptiness.

Aomame received the news of Tamaki’s death with little sense of surprise. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she must have been expecting it. She felt no sadness welling up. She gave the caller a perfunctory answer, hung up, and settled into a chair. After she had been sitting there for a considerable length of time, she felt all the liquids in her body pouring out of her. She could not get out of the chair for a very long time. She telephoned her company to say she felt sick and would not be in for several days. She stayed in her apartment, not eating, not sleeping, hardly drinking even water. She did not attend the funeral. She felt as if, with a distinct click, something had switched places inside her. This marks a borderline, she felt strongly. From now on, I will no longer be the person I was.

Aomame resolved in her heart to punish the man for what he had done. Whatever happens, I must be sure to present him with the end of the world. Otherwise, he will do the same thing to someone else.

Aomame spent a great deal of time formulating a meticulous plan. She had already learned that a needle thrust into a certain point on the back of the neck at a certain angle could kill a person instantly. It was not something that just anyone could do, of course. But she could do it. First, she would have to train herself to find the extremely subtle point by touch in the shortest possible time. Next she would have to have an instrument suited to such a task. She obtained the necessary tools and, over time, fashioned for herself a special implement that looked like a small, slender ice pick. Its needle was as sharp and cold and pointed as a merciless idea. She found many ways to undertake the necessary training, and she did so with great dedication. When she was satisfied with her preparation, she put her plan into action. Unhesitatingly, coolly, and precisely, she brought the kingdom down upon the man. And when she was finished she even intoned a prayer, its phrases falling from her lips almost as a matter of reflex:

O Lord in Heaven, may Thy name be praised in utmost purity for ever and ever, and may Thy kingdom come to us. Please forgive our many sins, and bestow Thy blessings upon our humble pathways. Amen.

It was after this that Aomame came to feel an intense periodic craving for men’s bodies.

CHAPTER 14

Tengo

THINGS THAT MOST READERS

HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE

Komatsu and Tengo had arranged to meet in the usual place, the café near Shinjuku Station. Komatsu arrived twenty minutes late as always. Komatsu never came on time, and Tengo was never late. This was standard practice for them. Komatsu was carrying his leather briefcase and wearing his usual tweed jacket over a navy-blue polo shirt.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Komatsu said, but he didn’t seem at all sorry. He appeared to be in an especially good mood, his smile like a crescent moon at dawn.

Tengo merely nodded without answering.

Komatsu took the chair across from him and said, “Sorry to hurry you. I’m sure it was tough.”

“I don’t mean to exaggerate, but I didn’t know whether I was alive or dead these past ten days,” Tengo said.

“You did great, though. You got permission from Fuka-Eri’s guardian, and you finished rewriting the story. It’s an amazing accomplishment for somebody who lives in his own little world. Now I see you in a whole new light.”

Tengo ignored Komatsu’s praise. “Did you read the report-thing I wrote on Fuka-Eri’s background? The long one.”

“I sure did. Of course. Every word. Thanks for writing it. She’s got a—what should I say?—a complicated history. It could be part of a roman-fleuve. But what really surprised me was to learn that Professor Ebisuno is her guardian. What a small world! Did he say anything about me?”

“About you?”

“Yes, did the Professor say anything about me?”

“No, nothing special.”

“That’s strange,” Komatsu said, evidently quite puzzled by this. “Professor Ebisuno and I once worked together. I used to go to his university office to pick up his manuscripts. It was a really long time ago, of course, when I was just getting started as an editor.”

“Maybe he forgot, if it was such a long time ago. He asked me to tell him about you—what sort of person you are.”

“No way,” Komatsu said with a frown and a shake of the head. “That’s impossible. He never forgets a thing. His memory is so good it’s almost frightening. He and I talked about all kinds of stuff, I’m sure he remembers.… Anyway, he’s not an easy guy to deal with. And according to your report, the situation surrounding Fuka-Eri is not going to be easy to deal with, either.”